Change
by Missed Nin
Summary: ..WA Time Writing Challenge.. Sabriel is dead, and the title Abhorsen is passed on. It's a cruel thing, asking an heir and a sister and a friend to stand strong at her predecessor's funeral and know the eyes of the country are on her.


Entry for the Writer's Anonymous Time Writing Challenge. One of the options was to write "c) A future fic - take a look at your fandom now, and then fast-forward five or ten (or any number of) years to the future.", and that's what this is.

_Sabriel is dead, and the title Abhorsen is passed on. It's a cruel thing, asking an heir and a sister and a friend to stand strong at her predecessor's funeral and know the eyes of the country will turn on her, and ask her to take up a corpse's mantle and stand in her footprints and do her job._

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Lirael felt like an awkward teenager again, standing formally dressed and trying to stay still in the middle of a silent, stationary group. When she was younger, she'd always felt like the ugly duckling among her proud blonde swan-like sisters, and she felt something very much like that isolation now. Not that these were her sisters: today, she was standing among the royalty, even further out of place.

Only... that wasn't true. She'd known all these people for five years, and for more than four of those years she'd been comfortable enough treating them as equals. She was an aunt to Ellimere, the crown princess, and King Touchstone was her half-brother-in-law. Or something of that kind; he was family.

But she knew that now, things would change.

Sabriel was dead.

So half-sister Lirael wasn't quite the same in-law any more. Not entirely the same person any more, and that left her unsure how to watch this or how to act.

Touchstone was dignified in his grief. Broken-hearted and openly so, but slow, heavy, regal, entirely Kingly as he laid the sword down on the Great charter-stone, the reservoir's water eddying round his feet and the lemon-pale light shuddering on the ceilings as the squares of it that came through the high windows reflected off the lake's surface. The three boats of mourners watching the King were black-garbed and unmoving in the shadows, quiet among the incessantly dripping water. Touchstone stood half in the light, his head bowed heavily, hair white and face so still it could have been carven. The line of shadow on his back moved more than he did, swaying as the boat rocked slightly.

There was silence among the small group, and the movements and sound of the water only made the stillness more complete. Outside, clouds made the sunlight light fade in and dim out again. Inside, Lirael dragged her eyes away from the water to what she'd been avoiding: the stone the King was standing before. She felt the pull of the Charter tug at her heart; life returns to Death. All life does so, and then moves on and on again and this is natural and proper. She knew that.

Sabriel's death had been neither natural or proper.

The Abhorsen had been cornered, having taken a regiment of guards to investigate a series of deaths at a water-mill. The evidence had been uncertain; the danger had been understated badly. That had been the contents of Lirael's report to the bereaved King. She'd written it with a face screwed up tight and a shaking hand, folded the paper, sealed it; turned and slammed her hands against the wall and shuddered and sunk down against it, head bowed, sobbing.

Seven hours before that, a message-hawk had arrived and found her dismissive: the Abhorsen-in-Waiting had been planning a visit up to the borderlands, and she'd spent the afternoon packing in preparation to leave. Seated, provided with a glass of wine by a sending, comfortable with a book she'd been kept too busy to read all week, she'd felt irritated about the disruption of her plans and she'd been nonchalant about the actual danger. Sabriel was the Abhorsen, she could cope.

That complacency had been completely ripped away. The message Lirael had listened to was the voice the desperate guardsman telling her the Abhorsen couldn't hold the attackers off any longer, please, _please_ come and please bring help... Knowing his voice was calling forward in time, that that this snap-shot moment of a battle had happened an hour ago, that anything could have happened now and and it'd take another hour before she could do anything...

Sabriel was dead.

Only one of the fourteen guards who'd gone with her had survived.

Sabriel was dead, and although it wasn't her fault, she could have stopped it. Lirael had wanted this day to make a visit to Ancelstierre; if she hadn't chosen today, things would have been different.

They could have been.

She looked away from the Charterstone and the King's back, across the water at the bright patches of sunlight that shook at the edges when the lake rippled.

There was turmoil in her thoughts. The strongest feeling in the confused mass of them in her mind was that she owed it to them to speak. She'd been there in the spot Sabriel had died at, half an hour too late to help anyone, but there nonetheless. And if there hadn't been any glory in the fight on a snowy mill-field that blood had stained brown-red, there had been glory in Sabriel's life, and pride, and dignity, and duty.

So she stepped forward, speaking to her poor husband (Touchstone's shoulders shook with tears but he held his back straight, and turned to her as she moved and smiled, a kind empty expression) but facing the group as a whole. Her voice rang out and echoed in the wide reservoir.

"Sabriel died victorious; she had saved a town and done all she could to protect the brave guardsmen who fought with her. And she died successful: she passed the Ninth Gate knowing that during her life-time she had rebuilt the Kingdom from ruins, and that she had raised a family. She died proud."

Touchstone reached across from his boat and put his scarred hand over hers, and they all stood quietly as the echoes faded.


End file.
